What is Beta
Beta - the Timișoara Architecture Biennale is a cultural project of the Timis Territorial Branch of the Order of Romanian Architects, organized by a dedicated team. Beta 2024 represents the fifth edition, marking ten years of activity.
Beta is the main architectural event in western Romania, with a Euroregional influence, having a collaboration component at the level of the neighboring countries – Serbia and Hungary. An important part of the international connections is provided by Beta's membership of the LINA community, a network connecting relevant institutions with emerging practitioners and thinkers working at the intersection of architecture and other culturally related fields space: this aims to promote budding talents.
Beta articulates a series of actions, projects, events and exhibitions around 3 pillars: Education, Profession and City. What we propose is an architecture of action, defined by the desire to be proactive, to collaborate, to enter into dialogue and to relate. To finally understand the complete and complex map of the built environment. We want to promote interaction between different entities, before talking about concrete interventions. We propose dialogue instead of statements, collaboration instead of isolation, processes instead of one-off events.
The structure of the biennial
Beta Awards
Beta consists of two components, the Main Exhibition and the Beta Awards, brought together by a program that mediates the entire content of the biennial.
The Beta Awards 2024 represent the main event of the Profession category, which supports and promotes quality architecture and professionals who contribute to the improvement of the built environment, being designed as a relationship interface both within the profession and between the profession and the socio-cultural environment in which it activates.
The Beta 2024 Awards will have, like the competition exhibitions so far, a Euro-regional character, by opening the competition to the three neighbouring countries: Romania, Hungary and Serbia. The organisation of the competition in this format is based on the similarities of context in the three countries, encouraging participation on a wider scale and thus contributing to the development of a multilateral dialogue about the future of the profession.Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
In addition to the Beta team's 10 years of activity, in 2024 we also aim to celebrate the production of quality architecture over the last decade. The Beta Awards will be able to provide an overview of the outstanding projects of the last decade.
The main exhibition
The theme of each biennial is most strongly reflected in the curatorial exhibition, which represents the result of in-depth research and exposes a theme relevant to the relationship between architecture, city and society.
The curatorial effort of each edition aims to set a discourse connected to relevant international themes, interpreting them through and for the uniqueness of the local and hyperlocal context.
The main exhibition Beta 2024 is curated by architect Oana Stănescu together with assistant curators Chase Galis and Simina Marin.
The theme of the edition will be announced during the Loading Beta teaser event, which will take place on 4-8 April in Timisoara.
Past editions
LINA Community
Beta - Timisoara Architecture Biennale is a member of LINA, the successor of the Future Architecture Platform, together with many other European architecture institutions, and is developing the LINA Architecture Programme, a three-year European cultural programme. In this context, LINA organises an annual call for ideas, looking for new emerging creatives to contribute to the cultural programme through collaborations with member institutions.
In preparation for the fifth edition of Beta, we invited LINA fellows to contribute to the Loading Beta programme, which took place in April in Timisoara.
Reinforcing the educational pillar of the biennial, Dérive (BE+NL) - a duo of architects working at the intersection of architecture, public space and urban strategies, guided students from FAUT - Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism Timișoara along the Bega River and through the greenhouses of the Young Naturalists' Station in a mind mapping workshop.
Together with the Future Foodscapes Research Unit (ES), a research collective focused on rethinking the future of the planetary food system, they presented their projects and discussed with the Timisoara audience at the LINA coffee talks about the role of architects at the intersection of communities, systems and places.
2023 was a special year for Timișoara, in which we celebrated the city as the European Capital of Culture. In this context, the team, through the View the City project, implemented a large-scale architectural installation - the Nursery. 1306 Plants for Timisoara, designed by MAIO Architects from Barcelona. The installation occupied a symbolic centrality of the city (Victoriei Square) and proposed to be read as an invitation to rethink and intensify the use of public space and its green spaces.
In this context, the Beta team participated in the LINA Architecture Program 2023-2024 through a series of collaborations with 3 groups of emerging creatives Ana Gallego Filter Café Filtré and Space Saloon & The MAAK in order to continue the activation program of the Victoriei Square.
© Marius Vasile
In 2021 and 2022, the Beta team continued the collaboration with Davide Tommaso Ferrando and Daniel Tudor Munteanu, this time as curators of the fourth Beta edition, with the theme of the City, a common good.
During the same edition of the Timisoara Architecture Biennial, the team collaborated with Alkistis Thomidou and Berta Gutiérrez Casaos, members of forty-five degrees - a design practice dedicated to the critical realisation of collective space. 45°N: the dividing line between the Mediterranean of our idealism and the North of our pragmatism, an imaginary border for thousands of migrants. 45° C: the highest temperature recorded in several European cities, a reminder that we can no longer postpone a social change towards decrease.
The Beta Team kept in touch with the group, met several times while they were researching the 45º parallel in Romania and answered their questions for the publication they prepared -Radical Rituals. During the opening weekend of Beta 2022, the book was launched in Timisoara in the presence of both Berta and Alkistis.
In 2020, Beta became a member of LINA, this was also the first year in which the project team collaborated with a series of emerging creatives, they contributed to enriching the program of the third edition of the biennale through a conference with the theme - The Future architectural practice today.
Together with Gianpiero Venturini, founder of Itinerant office and curator of the New Generations Festival, Davide Tommaso Ferrando and Daniel Tudor Munteanu, initiators and curators of the Unfolding Pavilion, and Will Jennings, visual artist, writer and educator, we debated the countless future projections regarding the practice architecture, the role and responsibility of an architect today.
How do we finance ourselves?
For each edition of the biennial, the Beta team applies for cultural funding (local, national and international) and aims to strengthen existing partnerships and create new ones.
Beta 2024 is a priority project of the Romanian Order of Architects, financed through the architecture stamp and co-financed by the Municipality of Timisoara through the Center for Projects.